


girls who can't breathe air, only fire

by jillyfae



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Clizzy Year, F/F, Ficlet Collection, Grief/Mourning, Lightwood Siblings, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Parabatai, Pining, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-10-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:22:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23203897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jillyfae/pseuds/jillyfae
Summary: Clary may have forgotten the Shadow World, but Isabelle Lightwood will never forget the girl who was going to be herparabatai, and she's certainly never going to abandon her, whether Clary knows about it or not.A clizzy vignette series, post-canon, of Clary's mundane life, and what happensafter.
Relationships: Clary Fray/Isabelle Lightwood
Comments: 18
Kudos: 85





	1. tug-of-war

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Izzy needs Clary to be safe. [[tumblr](https://faejilly.tumblr.com/post/612960725661581312)]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clizzy Year Prompt: Favorite Scene ( _parabatai_!)
> 
> SHBingo Square: Pandemonium

> _Entreat me not to leave thee,_  
>  _Or return from following after thee—_

Clary was at Pandemonium again. It was her favorite club; she went almost every weekend.

Izzy went almost every weekend, too. If Magnus and Alec were there, she ignored them. They ignored her back. They knew why she was there, and it wasn’t for them. (Sometimes the bartenders gave her drinks she hadn’t ordered, and she’d catch her brother or his husband slipping her a smile, and she knew they weren’t really ignoring her. But still, they left her alone, like she wanted, like she needed.)

At first she’d glamoured herself, lurked in corners like Alec used to do on his worst nights before they met Magnus, and just kept an eye on Clary.

It had been easy to stay hidden that way at first. To begin with, Clary had just gotten a few too many drinks, nursing them all night long as she stared at the crowds before staggering back to the apartment she shared with Luke. She thought her mother and surrogate sister and best friend had died in the same freak house fire that took out most of her possessions, thought she’d requested a delayed admittance to her art school, thought she’d taken a year off to rebuild a little.

Clary just needed a place that was _away,_ a place that didn’t remind her of all she’d lost. Izzy didn’t let herself think too much about what it might mean, that the place she picked was this one, so close to the Shadow World that she’d forgotten, that would never forget her and what she’d sacrificed to save them.

She thought about it all the time, but she didn’t know what it meant, if it meant anything, if someday it would mean _more,_ or less. She didn’t know if the angels meant this as a punishment, or a reward, for Clary, or for the rest of them. She didn’t _know..._ she hated not knowing.

She told herself to wait and see. She told herself she just needed to know that Clary was safe as she grieved. She wasn’t lying to herself, not really. Maybe it wasn’t the whole truth, but it was close enough.

> _For whither thou goest, I will go,_  
>  _And where thou lodgest, I will lodge._

But as the weeks passed, as Clary got closer to the fall and her first year of school, she started talking to the bouncers and bartenders, started nodding hello to the other people who spent their nights here, the people she’d seen before, week after week.

The first time Clary went out onto the floor to dance, Izzy almost gave herself a heart attack trying desperately to keep Clary in sight without bumping into a mundane, without drawing attention to herself from one of the Downworlders who could see through her glamour.

The next week Izzy skipped the glamour, though she still hid her runes, and she followed Clary onto the dance floor.

Not too close, just enough to make sure she didn’t lose her, just enough to make sure no one else was there, keeping too close an eye on her.

Sometimes Clary saw her, and her eyes lingered, and Izzy felt the flush beneath her skin, waiting for a hint of recognition. But Clary just nodded hello, as if to a stranger.

The next week there was just a hint of a smile, like she did with all the other regulars.

Izzy made herself smile back, like her heart didn't ache and her lungs still knew how to breathe.

Clary was safe, that was enough. It had to be enough.

> _Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God._  
>  _Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried._

Jace helped her keep an eye on Clary, and Alec, and Magnus. Simon didn’t dare, just in case Clary caught a glimpse of him. They all talked with Luke, made sure they all knew what her schedule was, how she was doing, when Clary was going to be out. Jace followed behind as she went to the studio the school let her access, despite her delayed enrollment. Magnus trailed her through galleries and museums. Alec developed an addiction to some ridiculous espresso concoction from the coffee shop where she worked, sipping away as he plowed through emails and reports.

Izzy followed her at night, using Clary’s occasional wanderings as a route for her own patrols. It was always her when Clary was at Pandemonium.

Most of the time though, Clary just came home, and Izzy whiled the night away, watching her building, perched on a fire-escape across the way. Sometimes Luke would bring her out some coffee, but mostly she was alone. Thinking. Trying not to think.

She’d wanted to be _parabatai.  
_

She’d wanted to take the oath, and mean it. (She meant it now, as she repeated it in her head, her eyes tracking the shape of Clary’s silhouette, her ears listening for the rhythm of Clary’s steps.) She’d wanted something she’d never wanted before, never even understood the appeal of, honestly. She’d never felt anything but regret and worry watching the way Alec and Jace pushed and pulled at each other, day after day.

But with Clary... she’d wanted it all.

And now it was gone.

Only it wasn’t. She was still here, _right there,_ close enough to touch and yet as far away as it was possible to be.

And yet.

Clary always went to Pandemonium. The coffee shop she worked at was right next to a tourist-trap of a New Age store that was also a cover for a proper occult shop that stocked supplies for Warlocks and Seelies, potions and blood for Werewolves and Vampires. She’d ordered takeout from Taki’s more times than Izzy could count, and she’d even outright asked Maia if they’d met somewhere, saying she looked familiar.

Maia had shook her head, and plastered a smile on her face, and if she’d gone back to her office to swear and cry later, neither Izzy nor Bat had ever told anyone.

Clary frowned sometimes at glamoured Downworlders, at the sigils of ward spells or faded runes on the sidewalks, as if she could almost see them. (Izzy had managed to cut down the repetitive hopeless conversation about Clary’s Sight (or lack of it) with Magnus to once a week. Occasionally they managed two! That was progress. Sort-of.)

She didn’t know what to _do._

So she watched, and she waited.

She’d wait forever, if she had to.

> _The Angel do so to me, and more also,  
>  If aught but death part thee and me._


	2. before the beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this is [theherocomplex's](https://faejilly.tumblr.com/post/616287803265925120) fault.

Clary hates mornings. 

She used to love them.

_Before._

The way the light was a different color than it was during the day, cleaner somehow, and quieter. 

The way _everything_ was quieter, so she could be too, just for a little while, could read or sketch or paint or curl up in the window and look up at the tiny sliver of sky she could see above her, the way the leaves shifted in the wind in the weird courtyard behind their building. 

Now though she hates that moment when she wakes up, when for a moment she’s forgotten, for a moment she _almost remembers..._

And then it’s gone, and she’s awake, and her mother and Dot and Simon are all _dead,_ and she’s in a room that still doesn’t feel like _hers,_ still doesn’t feel like home. She can hear Luke shuffling around in the kitchen or the living room, because he’s awake too, he’s already always awake too, no matter when she wakes up, whether it’s 3am or 5am or she’s slept through her morning studio time and it’s almost time for lunch and she has to get ready for work.

She never quite manages to sleep all the way through to afternoon.

She wonders if that would be better, if she never saw mornings again. 


	3. alternate POV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> glorious-spoon [prompted an alternative Clizzy POV](https://faejilly.tumblr.com/post/616479625359523840), so this is Clary's version of Pandemonium from ch 1.

Clary isn’t sure why she walks into this particular club. 

To be fair, she’s not sure why she’s still moving around at all, beyond the fact that she’s not sure what else to do. Her family’s mostly dead, she lost months of her life to a coma from smoke inhalation, Luke got her admittance to the Art Academy deferred, so she can still go in the fall, if she wants...

But she doesn’t know how to want much of anything at the moment.

Not anything that’s possible, anyways, and she’s trying to do more with each day than remember the way Simon used to push his glasses up his nose, or the way Dot would lean in and whisper off-color jokes so her moth-- 

So her mother wouldn’t hear.

She’d give anything to have her mother rolling her eyes at Dot’s inappropriate sense of humor again.

She’d give anything to have her mother... 

She keeps having nightmares about a dead _bird,_ and she can’t decide if that’s better than imagining what her family looked like after the fire or not. 

But she almost feels like smiling when she sees a sign flicker from DEMON to PANDEMONIUM, and the music spilling out the doors is good, and that’s enough to be a change from everything else. She texts Luke so he knows she won’t be home for awhile yet, and wanders closer. The bouncers let her in without even checking for an ID, which is both terrible of them and deeply appreciated.

She lets herself lean against the wall, and closes her eyes and falls into the music, and when she wanders home a few hours later she manages to sleep for a few hours without nightmares. 

She goes back again the next week.

They still don’t card her, not even when she orders the special cocktail of the night, and she hopes Luke doesn’t notice she’s still a little tipsy when she gets home. 

She’s not sure how many weeks before she lets herself dance, but that’s even better than hiding in the shadows for turning her thoughts _off,_ for wearing herself out enough she can sleep, and she never misses a weekend again. 

It’s never too hot when she’s dancing, nor too cold when she finds a perch along the walls, and it is, somehow, possible to hear the bartender when she leans over to order a drink even though she can still feel the beat from the dance floor humming in her bones. 

_It’s magic,_ she thinks, and wants to sob instead of laugh at the joke.

The crowds tend to prettier than your average cross-section of New York, none of them remotely average: too thin or too pale or too dark or too tall or too strong, wearing bright colored clothes and make-up, or dark leather and fancy shoes, all of them with shining hair and flashing eyes and the stamina to dance all night. 

It makes her want to paint again, at last, and she signs up for studio time on Mondays so she can lose herself in abstract swirls of color, trying to capture the energy, the power, the beauty of living in the dance at Pandemonium. 

Sometimes she paints fire instead, smoke and shadows and blood and a light so bright it blinds, but she destroys those before anyone else can see them. 

She starts to recognize some of the other regulars, people she’ll see on the dance floor most weeks, the usual crop of bartenders and bouncers. She admires the man with the impeccable make-up and fashion sense who holds court from the VIP section and dances like a dream. She overhears enough to learn that he’s the owner, so she makes sure to keep her under-age ass out of his way. She can’t resist watching him though, even sketches him sometimes, and the tall man who sometimes lingers by his side, their matching wedding rings catching the rainbow flashes of the strobe lights whenever their bodies sway closer together. 

It makes her want to smile, and cry, and she thinks about the way Luke goes off to lunch by himself now and then, coming back with the faint whiff of old books and sweet perfume around him, and Clary wonders about the woman he’s met, and how he can have forgotten her mom so quickly...

Or not forgotten. He’d gotten the few pictures they could salvage from their phones cleaned up and framed and put up on the wall of their new apartment, pictures of dinner with Simon and Becky and Aunt Elaine, of Jocelyn laughing with paint smeared on her cheek, of Dot dancing with Clary in the courtyard behind the shop.

But he’s moved _on,_ Clary thinks, more than she has. She hates him for it, just a little. But then she wonders what it was like for him while she was still in her coma, not knowing if she’d ever wake up, without even their old photos or her mom’s sketchbooks or Clary’s school art project to remember them by, having to say good-bye to the Lewises when Elaine moved to Florida, too hurt to stay in NYC and remember Simon around every corner, ... 

Pandemonium distracts Clary. 

There’s one other regular in particular, a woman who’s probably only a little older than Clary, a beautiful brunette who wears clothes that cling _just so,_ heels high enough that Clary has no idea how she stays steady on them, who has lush eyelashes and warm dark eyes and curves that make Clary forget to breathe, who always wears a silver snake bracelet that glints even more than the owner’s necklaces and ear cuffs, who sometimes has a ruby necklace that looks like it’s worth more than Clary’s tuition for the next four years. 

She dances like sin incarnate, and if Clary had figured out how live in the world again, she’d have asked her out for drinks, or coffee, or breakfast for the rest of their lives... so it’s probably just as well that all she can manage is a smile, sometimes, when their eyes catch across the dance floor.

She sketches her too, though, even more than the handsome owner and his husband. 

Sometimes she’s the only thing Clary _can_ sketch, the only thing beyond abstract screams in oil and acrylic, the only vision she can form out of charcoal that isn’t nightmares and monsters. 

She’s _beautiful,_ and if the world can have someone like her living in it, maybe some day Clary will figure out how to live again, too.


	4. back-to-back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alec & Izzy & *what is a soul-mate?*
> 
> written for otptober 2020 [[tumblr](https://faejilly.tumblr.com/post/630960168396587008)]

“We were going to try and be _parabatai_.” Izzy hadn’t meant to say that, but she heard her voice echo through the almost empty armory, and barely held in the wince.

She refused to turn her head to look at Alec directly, but even just out of the corner of her eye she could see him blink at her, then at the kindjals on the table in front of her. 

She could _see_ when he figured out what she was talking about, the _oh_ practically audible in the way his eyes widened.   


She couldn’t tell what he thought about it though, his expression mostly blank but vaguely... heavy. “I’m sorry?”

Izzy leaned back in her chair and sighed, and stared at the ceiling as if it would make more sense than her thoughts. “You sure about that?”

“Obviously.” Alec scoffed, and she lifted her head in surprise. He was leaning on the edge of the table now, close enough she could reach out and touch him; if she tried to twist her chair she’d bump her knees right up against his legs. “I was just surprised. You never wanted a _parabatai_ when we were growing up.”

She shrugged, and Alec’s lips twitched into that small fond smile he only ever aimed at her or Jace or Max. “You should have seen your _face_ when Jace first tried to bring it up to us, you were so horrified.”

“Well, I knew he didn’t want to bemy _parabatai,_ I didn’t have to think it was a good idea.” She sighed. “It worked out for you two, though.”

“Eventually.” Alec’s voice was dry as a desert, and she shrugged again.   


“Told you it would.”

He kicked her chair, not hard enough to make it move, but enough she couldn’t miss it.   


She stuck her tongue out at him.

He raised his eyebrows, but he was still smiling, warm and soothing.   


“How’d you know?” Izzy asked. “When Jace asked, that you should say yes?”

His eyebrows lifted even higher. “If I recall correctly, I didn’t, you did.”

She shook her head. “Before that. Not the ceremony itself, that was just nerves, you made it all the way to the finish line yourself.”

“And then you pushed me across it when I almost tripped?”

“Yeah.” She nudged him with her knee. “Wasn’t about to let my brothers embarrass me in public like that.”

He snorted, clearly not falling for that act. “Like you weren’t cheering when I embarrassed the family name much more dramatically and even more in public with Magnus.”

“Simon was the only one who _cheered_.” He gave her a very unimpressed face, and she couldn’t help the giggle. “You know what I mean.”

“Hmmm.” He tilted his head, clearly giving it more thought than she’d expected. Though she wasn’t sure _why_ that surprised her, he always gave things more thought than she would. That was, in fact, why she was asking him. “I almost didn’t.”

She blinked. She hadn’t realized that; he’d seemed happy about it, at first.

“I was sure he actually wanted to be your _parabatai_ and was only asking me because you weren’t interested.”

Izzy’s mouth opened, but she couldn’t manage _words,_ could barely manage _breathing._ She shook her head a little, and managed to mouth a _what_?

Alec huffed out a breath, clearly amused by her expression. “You have got to remember how good he was at everything Hodge and Mom asked him to do, and you’ve always been brilliant, the smartest person in the room and we all knew it. I always felt like I was playing catch-up to my younger siblings, it was _exhausting_.”

 _Jace worshipped you,_ she thought, but she swallowed the words. She’d always thought that that had been the real why behind Alec’s unfortunate crush, that having someone look at him like he was the center of the universe had to be intoxicating, and now, to realize he hadn’t even _noticed...  
_

She didn’t know what to say to that, or even if she should, now, over ten years too late.   


“But he was family, regardless of how confusing my own feelings were, and I knew he needed help remembering that.” Alec shrugged. “He needed to be a Lightwood, and I needed him to know we were here for him.”

Izzy frowned, trying to reconcile that with the glee with which they fought together, how broken they’d both been when they’d damaged the bond when Clary showed up, when Valentine came back, the _sound_ Alec had made when Jace had died by Lake Lyn.   
__

“That doesn’t sound like a good enough reason for a _soul bond_.” It sounded... too pragmatic.   


Alec shook his head. “It’s the only reason for a soul bond. You have to know that you wouldn’t be the same person if you lost them, they have to already be too important to live without, or you’ll hate that second heart-beat in your chest rather than treasuring it.”

Izzy swallowed. She’d always thought of the _parabatai_ ceremony, or a wedding, or a serious relationship, as a leap of faith, as things that could break your heart, that they were the beginning of the risk, not the end, not... not that they were just admitting out loud something that had already happened.

Alec waited, silent and steady.

“Why’d you listen to me?” She whispered this time, edging close to something she wasn’t sure she was ready to consider just to herself, much less out loud and to Alec. But Alec was the only person who might... who might know what she meant. “When I told you to be his brother and try and forget the rest?”

“Because at some level I knew you were right.” His voice was calm, no pause at all before he’d answered.

He hadn’t been surprised by her question.

“What if I’m wrong about--” she had to swallow to get her voice to work, “--about Clary?”

“You’re not.” Alec put his hand over hers, and she jerked in surprise; she hadn’t even realized she’d put her hand on his leg, her fingers starting to dig into his thigh as she tensed. “Do you want her to know that she’ll always be a Lightwood, that we’ll always be there for her... or do you want her to be _yours_?”  


_Oh.  
_

Izzy closed her eyes.   


“Shit.”

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [Not For Your Consumption](https://elisabethhewer.co.uk/post/117010844781/not-for-your-consumption) by Elizabeth Hewer. I adore the whole thing for both Clary and Izzy individually (and together) and am especially fond of the bit "Here are girls who carry kindness / and katanas in their rucksacks / because they never know which they'll need." (But girls who breathe fire makes a better title, imo.) 
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](https://faejilly.tumblr.com/) & [twitter](https://twitter.com/faejilly/) for prompts/questions/comments/flailing. 🥰


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